MEGASTRUCTURES

As we evolve and become more technological, our need for habitable space and energy continuously increases.

Enter — megastructures.

Megastructures are artificial habitats of gigantic proportions, built to expand our territory without us having to fly out and colonize alien worlds. They range from modest sub-lunar sizes, to galaxy-encompassing constructions.

Bernal Spheres

A quite ingenious construction, the Bernal sphere is a space habitat of fairly small size, that could house around 30’000 humans. It’s essentially a sphere of 16 km diameter, with the habitable crust on the inside. It harbors a functional ecosystem and atmosphere, all held together by centrifugal forces.

It’s pretty awesome for a generation ship, for example. But imagine the awkwardness of being able to look into the yards of your distant neighbors with only a pair of binoculars, or see your kid play in the schoolyard above you.

Globus Cassus

The Swiss architect and artist Christian Waldvogel came up with a way to increase real estate on Earth by literally turning it inside out. Our planet would be gradually deconstructed (excavated and pumped) and the material used to layer the inside of an immense artificial sphere almost the size of Jupiter. Humans and the entire planetary ecosystem would inhabit the inside of this hollow sphere, and gravity would be generated by centrifugation.

There would essentially be only two “continents”, two surfaces of this gigantic icosahedron that carry earth, water, and air. Sunlight would enter through other two sides left open, while the poles—which would have neither gravity nor atmosphere—would be used to store raw material.

Waldvogel described the process and result of this incredible undertaking in his book, Globus Cassus, which won the Gold Medal in the category “Most beautiful books of the World” at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2005. Needless to say it’s on my To Read list now. I frankly only stumbled upon this idea while researching for this blog post, and it’s slowly taking over my mind. DAMN YOU, Waldvogel! I have to finish my edits, not worldbuild for future novels!

Ringworld

An even greater fit of engineering would be the creation of a ringworld (as described by Larry Niven). It would essentially be a ring built around the sun, with the diameter of Earth’s orbit, carrying the matter of all planets in the system on its inside, all inhabited and held in place by—you guessed it—centrifugal force. The orbit would be maintained by jets attached to the outside of the ring; the atmosphere would be kept in place by gigantic walls along the ring’s rims; and night would be created by the shadows of several gigantic cubes orbiting within the ringworld’s orbit at fix intervals.

Alderson Disk

The next level of megastructure engineering requires even more matter and a much bigger surface. The Alderson Disk takes all the matter in the solar system and packs it into a gigantic CD with the sun at its center. The closer you are to the sun, the hotter it gets, and the further away you go, the cooler it gets. Night and day cycles are created by bobbing the disk up and down along the sun’s rotational axis, until one side of the disk or the other is left in darkness.

Dyson Spheres

Spheres built around the sun. You expected this next step, right? 😉

While their initial purpose in Dyson’s vision wasn’t to create a habitat, but to harvest the entire output of solar power to satisfy the needs of type II civilization, Dyson spheres have been further developed by theoreticians and science-fiction writers in various directions.

Dyson spheres can be of several designs:

the swarm — a set of independent satellites orbiting the sun in a ring

the bubble — a set of swarms distributed around the sun and held in place by solar sails

the shell — a solid shell encasing the star within its center, and thus absorbing 100% of its output and practically blacking it out to the rest of the galaxy

The ultimate Dyson sphere would encompass a whole galaxy, absorbing its entire energy output, reusing all of the hard material from its every planet, moon and asteroid, and offering habitable space to trillions of trillions of lifeforms and countless civilizations. Talk about MEGASTRUCTURES! *pants excitedly*

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19 Replies to “MEGASTRUCTURES”

Hey. I always loved those O’neill habitats. Didn’t realize he was working off the older ideas for the Bernal sphere. And I think the awkwardness about the land curving upward instead of downward would be something you could easily get used to. Actually, I adapted a Bernal sphere type habitat (actually a cylinder) for my generation starship in “Won’t somebody think of the children” when I realized my characters needed a more natural type of environment than your usual starship full of cabins and corridors.

Oiy, I could lose a day here. Thanks for cataloging these. I am an aspiring science fiction writer, and a long-time reader of it.

I also can’t help myself from telling you this, because you’re the first person actually from Transylvania I’ve ever encountered. In 2nd grade, my parents told me we were going to Pennsylvania to visit friends over the summer. I was so, so excited, and my parents were surprised. I apparently didn’t tell them WHY I was so excited, but I did tell my teacher that I was going to Dracula’s castle over break.

What the what? This is incredible, and I would love to see my kids playing in the schoolyard above me. Lol. I also love how you introduced Megastructures, I read it as a B-movie trailer. Great post.
Happy A-Z’ing.http://thewayofwytch.wordpress.com

This is so neat! You see Bernal Spheres a lot in anime. Gundam Wing, for example. The colonies are all Bernal Spheres and were a huge influence to me. I think the colony in the movie Elysium was one too? Ditto for the Citadel in Mass Effect (it has five arms that can open and close and have their own atmosphere and gravity, probably by rotating).

Also Halo has some ring worlds, literally the “Halos,” and the recently released Destiny has some enemies that look like they could certainly be capable of having Dyson Spheres. It’s neat to see that stuff visually.

Kepler scientists may have found a Dyson Sphere orbiting a star about 1,500 light years away. In the next year, it is planned to use the SETI network to look for narrow-band radio transmissions. If found, they would almost certainly point to an advanced civilization. Each of the dozen or so natural causes proposed have problems that eliminate them from contention. Perhaps there are some natural causes that may yet fit the data. But some scientists are beginning to consider the extraordinary possibility. Extraordinary proof would be in the radio transmissions.